I want to make a solarsystem that is to scale. I added the sun (The smaller one in the back) which is 1 AU away. But its light doesn’t reach my planet. Even the test star (The large one), barely reaches my planet. I enabled “Emissive Light Source”. I changed the “Emissive Boost” to extremely high values. But it never seemed to have any effect. I also tried to place point lights. But they to didn’t reach my planet. I can’t use a directional light, since there are multiple planets which all need to be lit on a different angle.
Use a point light inside your sun. In essence the emissive material would create softer shadows. In reality the sun is incredibly far away, there is hardly any place where bounced light can come from and the lack scattering through an atmosphere makes space shadows incredibly sharp/harsh.
I want to further stress on the distance of the sun to explain why a point light will suffice. If you place a normal sphere to represent the sun, the Earth will be a sphere with scale roughly 0.009, 21561 units away. (the Moon will be with scale 0.002 and 55 units away from the Earth)
I did try to place a point light. But even, after I set the radius far enough and the intensity to a crazy large scale, it still didn’t reach my planet. Even if a point light did work, would it get dimmer the further away you go? Or is it like everything in the influence area, get the same amount of light? My solar system is to scale btw.
What do you mean “to scale”? What is 1 engine unit equal to? You might need to scale down your system if you are working with too large coordinate values because you would be loosing precision and lights might not work properly.
Light, in reality, follows the inverse square law. i.e. the light gets dimmer proportionally to the square of the distance. By default UE light follow the same attenuation rules (Use Inverse Squared Falloff) but you can set the exponent if you uncheck that to make it falloff slower or faster. Note that whatever you do your light will never affect something outside the Attenuation Radius.
Moreover, you can simulate the size of the sun with Source Radius radius but the difference will be negligible.
Hello. With to scale I mean that one unreal unit is equal to 1 kilometer. But instead of Kilometers I use Centimeters, because with Kilometers Unreal crashes. My light reaches a distance of 100au (14959787069km). And the light works fine. But for some reason at distances under ~0.2au, the light starts to break like in the image. This seems weird as I would expect the light to break at a further distance instead of a closer distance. I tried placing a second light, but that also broke at this distance. Any ideas to fix this?
It works on large distances currently. But fails at shorter ones. And that seems weird. But I have come to the conclusion that light won’t work well for my game. I’m going to fake it in the material. I needed to do that anyway, because I want to simulate things like one sided heating. Which would use the same principle.
